Señora Diego Rivera

On August 21, 1929, Frida Kahlo, age 22, married Diego Rivera, age 42, in a civil ceremony, joined by a few close friends at the Coyoacán City Hall. Looking on as official witnesses were a homeopathic doctor and a wig maker. The judge was a pal of Rivera’s from his student days at the School of Fine Arts.

Diego, his hair slicked back, stood up in a plain grey suit, his Stetson hat, wide belt and the Colt revolver in his waistband. Frida had borrowed a long skirt and blouse from her maid and wore a red reboso stole over her shoulders.

She barely came up to his shoulder, giving the couple the appearance of a small dark china doll next to an immense porcelain pug dog. After the ceremony they posed for a photographer from La Prensa. The accompanying story read:

“Last Wednesday in the nearby village of Coyaocan, the controversial painter Diego Rivera was married to Miss Frida (sic) Kahlo, one of his students. The bride was dressed, as can be seen, in simple street garb, and the painter Rivera as an American without a vest.”

“The marriage was not at all pompous, but carried out in an extremely cordial atmosphere with all modesty, without ostentation and minus ceremonious pretentiousness. The newlyweds were extensively congratulated after the marriage by some intimate friends.”

And then the party shifted to La Casa Azul. Matilde Kahlo still fumed, muttering that Rivera now looked like a “fat farmer” – an improvement over the “fat toad”. Lupe Marín had also been invited and after a liberal sampling of tequila thrust her hands under Frida’s dress and hauled it up.

“Do you see those two canes?” Marín screeched. “That’s what Diego’s going to have to put up with and he used to have my legs!” She hoisted her own skirt, showing off her shapely gams for comparison. Frida made a grab for her. Friends restrained the two women and Frida bolted from the room in a fury. Diego, of course, was delighted to see two women he had bedded and wedded fighting over him and to celebrate the occasion headed for the bar.

His gay mood continued into the wee hours whereupon he drew his trusty Colt revolver and, aiming through a boozy fog, began blazing away. Guests sought cover until the pistol’s hammer clicked empty on spent cartridges.

Frida was fuming and did not spend the night with him. In fact she didn’t move into his house at 104 Paseo de la Reforma for several days.[9]

Though not known at the time, this wedding and its aftermath would be a microcosm of the rest of their lives together.

Señora Rivera began setting up housekeeping in his house as Diego was appointed director of the San Carlos Academy, his youthful alma mater.

Within a couple of weeks Diego’s reforms of the school’s curriculum met with a sour reception and he was summarily requested to leave the campus.

At that time, he accepted a commission to create a series of murals in the National Palace which were to form a visual history of Mexico.

The job was huge and he returned to it many times over the following years. It required five years just to complete the stairwell. The palace courtyard mural wasn’t begun until 1942.

Continuing in her role as the good wife, Frida reconciled with Lupe Marín who showed her how to prepare Diego’s favourite mole, rich puddings and other dishes that kept up his energy during ten to twelve hour work days. As Lupe had done, Frida brought Rivera his lunch at the scaffolding each day.

With her duties as Rivera’s doting wife claiming more of her time, she virtually stopped painting. In 1929, however, she did manage to creatively put her psychological house in order.

One canvas seems to mark a step in distancing herself from the cause of her physical turmoil. She painted The Bus.

There is nothing dramatic here, no re-enactment, or sentimental rehashing, or even any cursing of the fates. It is an interior view of a bus with six passengers sitting on the side bench in front of the windows: a shopping mother, a plumber in overalls, a barefoot Indita with a baby, a young boy, a fair-haired gringo in a western suit and porkpie hat, and a young Mexican girl in a western dress.

They face us without seeing us, each with their own thoughts. It’s as if Frida can ride the bus again without fear; these anonymous sitters are portraits from life and Frida is getting on with her own life as well.

The other Painting, on masonite, is entitled Self-Portrait “Time Flies”. In this self-portrait, she gazes at us wearing a vulnerable white top trimmed in lace with a heavy Indian jade necklace around her neck.

Exceptional antique earrings dangle from each lobe. Her expression is direct, but with a hint of a smile as though waiting for a photographer to click the shutter before dissolving into laughter. A cloud of words have been written interpreting the symbolism of the climbing airplane seen through the black-draped balcony window behind her head, or the significance of the alarm clock on the wooden stand behind her left shoulder.

Knowing the place she was in during 1929, the upward turn in her fortunes, a new man in her life, a feeling of confidence in her improving technique and seasoned with her natural ebullience, Frida Kahlo could just as well be enjoying a visual joke, a lightening up: time flies.

In December 1930, Rivera received a commission from the United States Ambassador Dwight Morrow to execute a series of murals – The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos, Conquest and Revolution – at the Cortes Palace in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City. Frida accompanied Diego and established their quarters in Morrow’s weekend house. This time, she spent considerable time at the project watching Diego work and offering the occasional question or critique.

Instead of being annoyed by this kibitzing, Diego found many of her suggestions to be helpful. Gaining more respect for her artistic eye and intellectual grasp of his work, Diego came to be influenced by her ideas throughout the rest of their relationship.

By this time, the Communist Party had its fill of Diego Rivera. Though he had held office in the party and showed solidarity at their rallies, his casual acceptance of commissions from capitalists went against the grain of the conservative ideologues.

In 1929, he was booted from the party and, demonstrating her loyalty to him, Frida quit too. Neither abandoned the goals of Communism and continued to espouse its anti-capitalist causes, but their support came from the sidelines.

In Cuernavaca, Frida experienced a miscarriage three months into her first pregnancy. This devastating event was topped shortly thereafter when she discovered Diego had been having an affair with one of his female assistants. At this point, she uttered her most quoted remark to the effect that she had experienced two catastrophes in her life: the first being hit by a tram. The second was Diego.

At the close of the 1920s, Mexico’s political climate shifted again and Diego found himself caught in the middle of an ideological battle. Not only was he persona non grata at Communist Party Headquarters, but the government had grown tired of seeing socialist themes peering back from “historic” murals popping up all over the country.

Feeling the heat on the back of his neck, Rivera accepted some commissions in San Francisco, packed up his brushes and Frida and headed for the United States.

The U.S. had been washing its hands of the Communist backlash following World War I in what came to be known as the “Red Scare”. Communists, anarchists and sympathisers had been rooted out all across the country and many deported back to Europe.

Two Italians, Sacco and Vanzetti, had been charged with murder during a robbery. Throughout the six-year investigation, both had been linked to the “Reds”.

The pair were electrocuted in August, 1927. Now one of the world’s most famous Communists, Diego Rivera came marching up to the California customs gates for a working visit.

Fortunately, Albert Bender, an internationally famous art collector, prevailed in their behalf and in the name of fine art, the gates swung open.

To express her thanks, Frida dedicated their wedding portrait, Frida and Diego Rivera to Bender and added a dove carrying a banderol telling the story of the dedication.[10]

He was so pleased he went on to become one of her early patrons. The painting shows Diego, complete with his palette and brushes as the “official” painter in the family and Frida holding his hand, dressed as a submissive Mexican wife. If this was the role she had accepted, all that changed during the eight months Diego worked on his mural at the Luncheon Club of the Pacific Stock Exchange. Señora Rivera was undergoing a change of her own.

If the art crowd in San Francisco was ready to spread the red carpet for Diego, nothing had prepared them for Rivera’s petite bombshell of a wife. Edward Weston, the photographer, had struck up a friendship with Diego when Weston had spent time creating an extraordinary body of work in Mexico.

Now, he photographed Rivera again in California and made Frida’s acquaintance. Weston kept scrupulous diaries and wrote of his encounter with Mrs Rivera:

“She is in sharp contrast with Lupe (Marín, Rivera’s ex-wife) – petite, a little doll alongside Diego, but a doll in size only, for she is strong and quite beautiful, shows very little of her father’s German blood.”

“Dressed in native costume even to huaraches (leather sandals), she causes much excitement in the streets of San Francisco. People stop in their tracks to look in wonder.”[11]

She arrived in the United States as the Great Depression began settling in, wiping out fortunes, closing banks and chasing farmers off their land with foreclosures nailed to farmhouse doors. The fun of the Roaring Twenties was a wistful memory. But still, there was money for murals and for welcoming parties among San Francisco’s society set where they lionised Diego and scrutinised Frida.

She was, for all her philosophical reading and political rhetoric, a provincial girl of 23 on her first trip away from home and her friends. She avoided the people of San Francisco, finding them “boring” and with faces like “unbaked biscuits”.

She did enjoy shopping trips where she found English a difficult tongue to master and relied on her friend, Lucille Blanch, the artist and wife of one of Diego’s American assistants.

Unlike her role as Diego’s close partner in Cuernavaca, Frida often found herself with time on her hands in the City by the Bay. Diego had selected Helen Wills Moody, the tennis star, as his model for an “earth mother” in the Pacific Stock Exchange mural, Allegory of California.

As was his usual practice, he began an affair with Moody. Frida, in turn, took up an on-going sexual liaison with Christina Hastings, the wife of one of Rivera’s assistants. As Frida’s affair proceeded along, her health took another turn for the worse.

The tendons in her right foot and ankle became irritated and she found walking difficult. She decided to consult a San Francisco physician and friend of Rivera’s, Doctor Leo Eloesser.[12]

The doctor and the artist immediately struck up a friendship. Besides determining that Frida had scoliosis, a congenital spinal deformation, he also discovered what he interpreted to be a connection between the return of her leg and foot problems and the stress of her chaotic emotional life. As small and large crises occurred, such as Diego’s latest public dalliance, her physical problems manifested themselves.

Eloesser recommended a healthy living regimen to calm both her physical and mental agonies. She kept up their friendship, but, for the most part, ignored his advice.

Instead, she turned to her art and a series of portraits. Meanwhile, Rivera created his humorous mural in the San Francisco Art Institute, The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City, depicting himself and his assistants on the scaffolding painting the mural in a trompe l’oeil masterpiece.

Frida produced a masterpiece of her own. She painted Portrait of Luther Burbank, the famous horticulturist whose 53 years of cross-breeding plant species had made a huge contribution to California’s agriculture. He had recently died, but she memorialised him in a fantasy that wed his body to the soil and the abundance of riches his work had produced.

This painting marked a diversion from her standard portrait style as well as a shift to a story-telling narrative that contained an ever-expanding body of symbolism. The Portrait of Luther Burbank began the rise of her reputation from competent, dilettante portraitist toiling in the shadow of her famous husband to an emerging talent who may have something important to say.

Her Luther Burbank seems to rise from an ancient hollow tree stump into a desert landscape beneath a vaulted blue sky of swirling cumulus clouds. California sun suffuses the above-ground scene as though coming from all directions. Heavily fruited trees, one rich in greenery and the other, an improbable graft, sink their roots into the soil that glows with a golden luster.

The ground beneath the tree stump has been hacked away revealing rich loam, the weathered husk of the ancient tree and its root system greedily drawing sustenance from Burbank’s skeletal remains. Even in death he is reborn to fertilise California’s agriculture. This simple allegorical tribute marks the start of Frida’s fully developed story telling, or retablo paintings.

Retablos are small paintings, usually produced on pieces of tin that commemorate a traumatic event. Retablo means “behind the altar” and comes from the Christian-Mexican religion. Three components make up a retablo painting: a depiction of an event, the vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and text that describes the event.

The paintings are commissioned from professional retablo painters, a 150 year-old tradition that almost died out in the first quarter of the 20th century.

Frida reached back into her own heritage, stripping away the religious context and using only the narrative elements. She also resurrected the Mexican traditional skeleton that represented the celebration of death from her “Day of the Dead” revelries.

In Coyoacán, shops and homes were hung with grinning skulls and skeletons. Skulls made of sugar were gobbled up by Mexican children wearing fright masks as families remembered their dead and the continuity of life with gaiety, parades, exploding and fizzing fireworks and candles glowing hot in the night.

Her isolation was put to good use as she completed a pencil portrait of her lover, Lady Christina Hastings wearing a tam, painted the full length oil Portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser with a schooner-rigged sailboat and an undistinguished portrait of Mrs Jean Wright, the wife of Diego’s chief assistant Clifford Wright.

The picture reveals Frida’s disinterest in her sitter whom she considered to be self-involved and pretentious. Other than her shopping trips to Chinatown where she loved to observe the Chinese children – and they gawked at her Mexican costume – Frida found San Francisco unremarkable. She did not take advantage of its urban sprawl nor its scenic bay for subject matter.

Adapting to another culture, thrust into an alien milieu where she was an object of curiosity, separated from her friends and relatives and language, all these influences coloured her judgments and priorities.

As her loneliness forced her back to her work, she began to consider its value as public art rather than closely held keepsakes for friends. San Francisco’s cosmopolitan setting revealed new vistas and possibilities. In a letter to her friend, Isabel Campos, she wrote:

“I don't have girlfriends; one or two that cannot be called friends. That's why I spend my days painting. In September I'll have an exhibition (the first one) in New York. Here, I didn't have enough time and I could only sell a few paintings. But it was very good for me to come here because it was eye-opening and I saw lots of new and cool things.”[13]

With the completion of the mural commissions, the Riveras flew back to Mexico on June 8, 1931. With his accumulated wages Diego generously paid off Guillermo Kahlo’s mortgage on La Casa Azul in Coyoacán and planned to return to the unfinished fresco at the National Palace.

He also had an idea for their mutual abode that he proposed to a painter and architect friend, Juan O’Gorman. Diego suggested two houses designed in the Bauhaus International style – minimalist and boxy – be erected in near-by San Angel.

They would stand side by side, joined together by a footbridge between the two top stories. Each would have a separate entrance and serve as both living and studio spaces for the two artists, a recognition of Frida’s growing independence. Of course, the design also offered Diego privacy for his sexual peccadilloes.

They had been home only a few months when Diego received an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to help create a retrospective of his work.

Though she faced being torn away from her Mexican roots, this news must have brightened Frida’s prospects for a show of her own work. For that, she would once again troop back to “Gringolandia”, and hob-nob with the rich boring art and society set that fluttered around Diego like so many mouths around a jalapeño. They sailed on the cruise ship Morro Castle in mid-November to arrive in Manhattan on December 13, 1931 in time for the December 23 show.

Letter to Isabel Campos

San Francisco, May 3, 1931

Dear buddy,

I received your little letter buten centuries ago, but I couldn’t respond because I wasn’t in San Francisco, but further south, and I had a lot of things to do. You can’t imagine how happy I was to receive it. You were the only friend who remembered me. I’ve been very happy, but I miss my mother very much. You can’t even imagine how wonderful this city is. I am writing little about it, so I’ll have a lot to talk to you about. I’m coming back soon to the powerful “town” – in the middle of this [month], I think – I will tell you buten things then. [We’ll have] lots of conversations — I want you to send my affectionate regards to Aunt Lolita, Uncle Panchito, and to all your brothers and sisters, especially Mary. The city and the bay are “cool”. I don’t like gringos that much; they are very dull people and they all have faces that look like uncooked bread (especially the broads). What is cool here is Chinatown; these herds of Chinese are very nice. I’ve never seen more beautiful children in all my life than Chinese children. Oh, God! They are marvelous. I would like to steal one so you could see him.

As for my English, I don’t even want to talk to you about it, since I’m stuck. I bark what’s most essential, but it is very difficult to speak it well. However, I make myself understood, at least with the damn shopkeepers. I don’t have girlfriends; one or two that cannot be called friends. That’s why I spend my days painting. In September I’ll have an exhibition (the first one) in New York. Here, I didn’t have enough time and I could only sell a few paintings. But it was very good for me to come here because it was eye-opening and I saw lots of new and cool things.

Since you are in touch with my mother and Kitti [Cristina Kahlo], tell me about them. I would really appreciate it. You still have time to send me a letter if you want. I ask you to do it since it would make me very happy. Is it too much to ask? Say hi to everyone when you see Dr. Coronadito, Landa, and Mr Guillen; to all those who remember me.

And you, my dear little friend, receive the usual affection from your buddy who loves you very much.

Frieducha

Kisses for your little mother, dad, and siblings. My address: 716 Montgomery St.

Letter to Dr. Leo Eloesser

Coyoacán, June 14, 1931

Dear Doctor,

You can’t imagine how sorry we were for not seeing you before coming back here, but it was impossible. I called your office three times, but couldn’t find you, since nobody answered, so I asked for Clifford to please explain this to you. Besides, imagine, Diego worked until midnight the day before we left San Francisco. That’s why we didn’t have time to do anything, so I am writing this letter in the first place to apologise a thousand times and to tell you also that we’ve arrived safely in the country of enchiladas and refried beans. Diego is already working in the [National] Palace. He’s been having problems with his mouth and he is very tired besides. If you write to him, I would like you to tell him that it is necessary for his health that he rest a little, because if he keeps working like this, he is going to die. Don’t tell him that I told you how much he is working, but tell him that you found out and that it is absolutely necessary that he rest a little. I would really appreciate it. Diego is not happy here because he misses the kindness of the people of San Francisco and the city itself. He wants nothing else but to go back to the United States to paint. I came back well, skinny as always and fed up with everything, but I feel much better. I don’t know how to pay you back for my healing and all your kindness toward Diego and me. I know that with money would be the worst way, but the biggest gratitude I could have would never compensate for your kindness. I implore and beg you to be kind enough to let me know how much I owe you, because you can’t imagine how shameful I feel for having left without giving you something worth your kindness. When you answer me, please tell me how you are, what you are doing, everything. Also, please say hello to all our friends, especially to Ralph and Ginette.

Mexico is, as always, disorganised and messed up. The only thing it has left is the great beauty of the land and of the Indians. Everyday, the ugly part of the United States steals a piece; it is a shame, but people have to eat and it is inevitable that the big fish eat the small one. Diego sends his best wishes and I send all the affection you know I feel for you.

Frieda

As with San Francisco, upon arrival Diego and Frida were adopted by the rich and famous, by both old and new money and as before, Diego was the centre of the maelstrom. The gallery walls held 150 of his works and showed eight mural panels that Diego had prepared for the exhibition. Art critics travelled to New York from around the country to add their two centavos to the pile of newsprint the show generated as 60,000 attendees marched from room to room. The show was a great success.

The petite 24-year-old Mexican girl on Diego Rivera’s arm was referred to in the outpouring of prose as “shy” and “retiring” and who, the commentators mentioned in passing, “did a bit of painting herself”.

Frida was paraded from one welcoming gala to another, smiled at, toasted and had questions shouted at her slowly as if high volume and low speed made English much more understandable. Back at their hotel, she wrote Doctor Eloesser:

“This upper class is disgusting and I’m furious at all these rich people here, having seen thousands of people in abject squalor.”[14]

Her quaint rejection of American urban conditions at the start of the Great Depression underscores her own naïve political rhetoric about uplifting the masses when she never really came into contact with her own poverty-stricken Mexican “masses”. But in New York, the vast gap between the chauffeured limousines sailing up and down concrete canyons and bread lines shuffling into store-front soup kitchens must have graphically reinforced Frida’s socialist sensibilities. Putting down her American hosts might also have been a side effect of being ignored as an artist in her own right yet again. Though Diego praised her painting, no show offers were forthcoming. She continued to be “Mrs Rivera”.

One good outcome to the New York exposure was Frida’s opportunity to view original modern works from a variety of contemporary masters. It’s not difficult to imagine her wandering from gallery to gallery within the Museum of Modern Art, coming to grips with Surrealists, Expressionists, Picasso, Braque, the dreamscapes of de Chirico and other deeply personal and abstract constructions.

Diego had accepted a commission from Detroit, Michigan in America’s industrial heartland to paint a mural in the lobby of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

He relished the idea of painting machines and assembly lines that, in his Marxist philosophy, relieved the masses of workers from the drudgery of repetitive toil, leaving them more time to begin the workers’ revolution.

Detroit represented the quintessential example of American capitalism, where the machine age met the proletariat, the perfect ground zero for the overthrow of the Imperialists who were buying his work. The Rivera entourage arrived by train on April 21, 1932. Frida was far less sanguine about the smoke-shrouded factory town on the Rouge River. She wrote to Doctor Eloesser that Detroit,

“…seems like a shabby old village. I don’t like it at all, but I am happy because Diego is working very happily here, and he has found a lot of material for his frescoes that he will do in the museum. He is enchanted by the factories, the machines, etc. like a child with a new toy.”[15]

Children were on Frida’s mind. She had scarcely unpacked when she discovered she was pregnant. The idea both pleased and terrified her. She had always loved children and had a deep maternal instinct that she had lavished on Diego. But she feared her heredity and her ability to carry the pregnancy to term. Frida confided in Eloesser,

“Do you think it would be more dangerous to have an abortion than to have the child?... You know better than anyone else does what kind of shape I’m in. First, because of the inheritance I carry in my blood (Guillermo’s epilepsy), I don’t think the child could come out healthy.”

“Second, I’m not strong and the pregnancy would weaken me even more... Here, I don’t have any relatives who could help me out during and after my pregnancy, and no matter how much poor Diego wants [to help me] he cannot, since he has all that work and a thousand more things…”[16]

Her conflicts were very real and if she had any idea that sharing a baby would put an end to Diego’s affairs, she was probably wrong. He had already abandoned two children from a previous marriage and rarely saw the daughter born by Lupe Marín.

She also consulted a doctor in Detroit who advised her that the child could be delivered by caesarean section. She decided to have the child. The Detroit doctor ordered bed rest.

As usual, Frida ignored him, began driving lessons and made trips to the mural work site. She continued to trail Diego to the homes and parties of the Motor City’s smokestack barons wearing her brightly-coloured Tehuana costumes with her arms, neck and fingers layered and looped with antique jewellery.

Finding the gringos easily shocked, dull of wit and wrapped up in their pursuit of celebrity, she turned loose her more outrageous personality quirks. On her way into dinner on the arm of Henry Ford – a notorious anti-Semite – more than a few jaws dropped when Frida asked him, “Mr Ford, are you Jewish?” The Wardell Hotel in which they were staying was restricted against Jews and when Diego told the hotel’s management that he and Frida were Jewish, the restriction was immediately dropped.[17]

In the fourth month of her pregnancy, July 4, 1932, Frida miscarried. Lucienne Bloch, one of Diego’s assistants and Frida’s friend, discovered her early in the morning sitting in a pool of blood and screaming. She continued to haemorrhage on the way to the Henry Ford Hospital and spent much of the day disgorging clots of blood and tissue that had been her child.

“I wish I was dead!” she wailed in despair. “I don’t know why I have to go on living like this!”[18]

Emotionally and physically drained, she fell back on her only consolation, her painting. She requested medical books for research pictures of embryos, and anatomy, but the doctors refused. Diego sneaked some books to her and she began to draw. As with the Portrait of Luther Burbank, she turned her loneliness and depression into creative activity. Only this time, the subjects were far more personal and she scoured her emotions to tell her sad narrative.

Paintings and some lithographs were accomplished during her time in Detroit. When she was well enough to leave the hospital, Diego asked the New Workers School where he was working on a mural to set up a small studio for her that included lithography stones and a press.

Her monochrome lithographs, Frida and the Miscarriage, resemble medical illustrations describing the steps that led to the event from sperm and eggs to zygote to foetus tied by its umbilical cord that twines around Frida’s leg. Her eyes weep tears as does her vagina ending in a pile of clotted blood at her feet.

The blood fertilises some plants, recalling the Burbank portrait and the cycle of life. It is an analytical collection of images in a flat plane that are antiseptic and sting with their clean incisions. She found lithography unsatisfactory and these prints are the only examples of her work in that medium. The paintings: Window Display in a Street in Detroit, Henry Ford Hospital, Self-Portrait (Standing) along the Border between Mexico and the United States, and My Birth are quite something else.

As if the miscarriage was not sufficiently crushing, Frida received news from home that her mother was dying of cancer. Still healing from her trauma, Frida had to return to Coyoacán as soon as possible.

There was no flight available and the phones to Mexico were temporarily down. She elected to make the trip by train and bus, an arduous journey for someone in good health. Diego insisted Lucienne Bloch accompany her. She arrived in Mexico on September 8 and her mother died on September 15, 1932. Frida remained with her father and her family and checked on the progress of the twin houses under construction until she became anxious to return to Diego.

By October 21, she and Lucienne were back in Detroit and she learned that Diego had been offered another commission, this time to create a mural in the lobby of the RCA building in New York’s Rockefeller Center. Following that, the 1933 World’s Fair being held in Chicago wanted a mural on the theme of “machinery and industry”.[19] More months would be spent in “Gringolandia”. Diego worked himself to exhaustion to complete the Detroit project and had little time for her. Frida took up her brushes to restore her spirits.

Letter to Dr. Leo Eloesser

May 26, 1932

I have to tell you a lot about myself, even though what we have to discuss is not very pleasant. In the first place, health-wise, I’m not well at all. I would like to talk to you about anything but that, since I understand you must already be tired of listening to everyone’s complaints about sickness and especially with sick people; but I would like to think that my case is a little different since we are friends, and Diego as well as I love you very much. You know that well. […] The most important thing and what I mainly want to consult with you about is the fact that I am two months pregnant. For that reason I saw Dr. Pratt again, who told me he knew what my general state is since he talked to you about me in New Orleans. [He said] I didn’t have to explain to him again about the accident, heredity, etc., etc… Given my health, I thought it would be better to have an abortion. I told him that and he gave me quinine and very strong castor oil for a purge. The day after I took this I had a very slight [case] of bleeding, almost nothing. I’ve had some blood during five or six days, but very little. In any event, I thought I had aborted and I went to see Dr. Pratt again. He examined me and told me that he is completely sure that I did not abort and that it would be much better to keep the child instead of causing an abortion through surgery. [He said] that in spite of my body’s bad shape, I could have a child through a Caesarean section without great difficulties even considering the small fracture in the pelvis, spine, etc., etc… He says he will take it upon himself to look after me closely if we stay in Detroit during the next seven months of my pregnancy. I want you to tell me what you think in all honesty, since I don’t know what to do in this case. Naturally, I am willing to do whatever you think is most advisable for my health; that’s what Diego also thinks. Do you think it would be more dangerous to have an abortion than to have the child?

Two years ago I had a surgical abortion in Mexico, more or less under the same circumstances as now, after a pregnancy of three months. This time it’s been only two [months] and I think it would be easier, but I don’t know why Dr. Pratt thinks it would be better to have the child. You know better than anyone else does what kind of shape I’m in. First, because of the inheritance I carry in my blood, I don’t think the child could come out healthy. Second, I’m not strong and the pregnancy would weaken me even more. Moreover, my situation is kind of difficult since I don’t know how much time Diego will need to finish the fresco. If it is in September, as I estimate, the child would be born in December and I would have to go back to Mexico three months before the birth. If Diego were to finish later, it would be better for me to wait to have the child here, and there would still be terrible problems travelling with a child a few days old. Here, I don’t have any relatives who could help me out during and after my pregnancy, and no matter how much poor Diego wants [to help me] he cannot, since he has all that work and a thousand more things. So I could not count on him at all. The only thing I could do in that case would be to go back to Mexico in August or September and have it there. I don’t think Diego is very interested in having a child since what he’s most concerned with is his work and he is more than right. Children would come in third or fourth place. I don’t know if it would be good for me to have a child since Diego is constantly travelling and in no way would I want to leave him by himself and stay in Mexico. That would only bring problems and hassles for both of us, don’t you think? But if you really share Dr. Pratt’s opinion that it would be much better for my health not to have an abortion and to have the child, all those difficulties can be solved in one way or another. What I want to know is your opinion, more than anyone’s, since you know best about my situation. I would thank you with all my heart if you would tell me clearly what you think would be better. In case the abortion were more advisable, I beg you to write to Dr. Pratt, since maybe he is not well aware of all the circumstances.

Since performing an abortion is against the law, maybe he is scared or something, and later it would be impossible to undergo such an operation. If, on the contrary, you think that having the child could be beneficial to me, then I want you to tell me whether it would be better for me to return to Mexico in August and have it there with [the help of] my mother and sisters or whether I should have it here. […] I always feel nauseated because of this pregnancy and so I’m screwed! Everything makes me tired, since my spine hurts. My leg is also having problems because I cannot exercise and as a result my digestion is really bad! However, I always have the will to do many things and I never feel disappointed in life, as in Russian novels.

I understand my situation perfectly and I’m more or less happy, first of all because I have Diego, my mother, and my father; I love them so much. I think that is enough, and I’m not asking life for a miracle or anything like that. Of my friends, you’re the one I love the most and that’s why I dare bother you with so many stupidities.

Forgive me and when you answer this letter, tell me how you have been. Receive Diego’s and my affection and a hug from Frieda.

If you think that I need to have surgery right away, I would appreciate your sending a discreet telegram to me, so you don’t get into trouble. Thanks a million. My best regards F.

To combat the silence of the hotel room, Frida endured a local news hen, Florence Davies, whose column Girls of Yesteryear, featured “…visiting homes of Interesting people”. She showed up at Frida’s room at the Wardell for a chat. Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo’s definitive biographer, captured the scene where Frida holstered her acerbic wit and played the cheeky, but adoring wife for the newspaper’s scribe. The column is headed: Wife of Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art.

Davies wrote:

“Carmen Frida Kahlo Rivera… is a painter in her own right, though very few people know it. ‘No’, she explains, ‘I didn’t study with Diego. I didn’t study with anyone. I just started to paint’. Then her eyes begin to twinkle. ‘Of course’, she explains, ‘he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist’.”

“Then the twinkles in both black eyes fairly explode into a rippling laugh… In Detroit she paints only because time hangs heavily on her hands during the long hours while her husband is at work in the court…”[20]

Even considering the gossipy nature of this “ladies’ feature”, Frida finally began emerging from “shy and retiring” to feel her wings as these few crumbs of recognition fell her way. While she shopped and had some good times with Lucienne, one by one exceptional paintings surfaced in her wake as reminders of deeper and darker feelings. One in particular, a retablo probably begun before she left for Mexico, is titled, My Birth.

To more faithfully reproduce the retablos that hang in Mexican churches and on which her narrative paintings are based, Diego suggested she paint on metal. And like the metal it is painted upon, My Birth is a cold, soulless evocation depicting Frida Kahlo’s emergence into the world as her adult head is forced from her own womb, thrust out between splayed legs onto blood-soaked sheets.

The mother’s face is covered as though wrapped in a burial shroud. There is no one in attendance. It is a joyless birth.

My Birth returns the religious context that had been removed from Portrait of Luther Burbank, hanging a picture of the Mater Dolorosa, a weeping virgin, above the bed in place of the shrouded face. But as one element is returned, another is taken away.

Frida places the message banderole across the bottom of the painting that usually describes the event and offers a prayer to the virgin. This time, the scroll is blank. Who’s to thank when one is constantly mistreated by the fates?

In the work, Henry Ford Hospital, the city of Detroit clings to a distant horizon, an abstract industrial backdrop as a bed seems to levitate above a brown plain (the alternative name for this work is The Flying Bed). On the bed is a naked, weeping Frida with a sick, grey face, lying in a puddle of blood and tethered by red umbilical cords gathered in her hand at her swollen stomach to floating objects that circle her. A snail uncoils from its shell, her male foetus bobs above her like a grotesque balloon. Beneath the bed is a trodden flower and a misshapen pelvis. Around the edge of the bed is written the title, Henry Ford Hospital and the date, “July of 1932 F.K”.

Self-Portrait (Standing) along the Border between Mexico and the United States is a painting on metal plate, a visual joke that is both humorous and melancholy, depicting Frida dressed in a pink western confection with flounces and white gloves. She stands between depictions of the western industrial world and an ancient agrarian landscape steeped in ritual and tradition. Above the Mexican pyramids, the ancient Aztec sun and moon fight their never-ending cosmic battle.

In one hand she holds a small Mexican flag as though waiting for a parade to pass. Her right hand holds an “inappropriate” cigarette. Flowers and plants grow from roots that dig deep into the soil of Mexico while industrial dirt offers a crop consisting of an electrical generator, a light bulb and a radiant heater. An American flag rises from Ford’s smokestacks as a chorus line of cyclopean roof-top ventilators marches past. Her conflicts are obvious in this work that owes much to Diego’s crowded muralist style, but she speaks with her own unique voice.

A store window on a Detroit street, discovered by Frida and Lucienne on a shopping trip for sheet metal, becomes a curious slice of life as Window Display in a Street in Detroit. This funky collection of unrelated objects captured her interest as an assemblage more “real” than much of the artfully manipulated work she had seen in galleries.

When she described it to him with such excitement, Diego suggested she paint it. The result is a blend of painterly technique and naïve folk art. George Washington peers at us from his picture frame festooned in red, white and blue and resting on a red, white and blue bit of carpet. He’s joined by a ceramic eagle plaque and a fuzzy lion growling at the window pane. Behind them a plaster horse is frozen en passant in mid stride. In the rear, we see the store is abandoned, ready for redecoration with paint pots, a stepladder and the painter’s gloves.

The work is a captured moment of juxtaposed objects in the fashion of Edward Weston’s photographic images, a complex composition that would be damaged if one element was removed. Frida’s eye for found compositions was as keen as her wanderings through the halls of her own fertile imagination. Her bags were packed by the time Diego finished the Detroit mural commission. To his delight, no sooner had the murals been unveiled than the good burghers of the Motor City let fly their outrage in the local press.

“Communistic!”

“A heartless hoax!”

“A travesty on the spirit of Detroit!”

“Hose it off the walls!”

While the protectors of American morality and “right thinking” formed up committees, groups of workers from the auto plants detailed shifts of volunteer guards to protect the murals. Debate caromed back and forth in the press. Exhausted but happy, Diego Rivera, his “dabbler” wife, and their assistants were gone within a week. The final payment check warmed Panzón’s pocket as the Pullman cars rattled behind their locomotive speeding east toward New York City.